Touchstone blog is no longer publishing new content, as we’ve moved the TUC’s new policy blog content to our main website. You can read new blogs from the TUC at www.tuc.org.uk/blogs. Thanks for being a Touchstone blog reader over the years and we hope you will also find our new blogs as useful to you.

Imagine you get home from work today and something’s broken. It doesn’t really matter what it is. Something’s up with the car, or the fridge isn’t actually keeping anything cold, or maybe the ceiling’s leaking. Regardless, something needs sorting and it’s going to cost you £500. Do you reckon you’d be able to cover the…

Fifteen months on from the EU referendum, the government will today set out its aspiration to continue contributing to EU science programmes. As the entire STEM community has repeatedly asked for clarity of direction, we can all be pleased about this. There is an overwhelming case for continuing to buy in to EU research. For…

There’s been a lot of talk about the ‘new world’ of pension freedom. But there’s nothing novel about what people need when they retire. Most require an income to replace their wage, just as they always have. So-called pensions freedom is one of ex-Chancellor George Osborne’s great gifts to the nation. From 2015, no longer…

We are not asking for a lot. We are asking to be treated with respect, have guaranteed hours, and to be paid a decent living wage of £10 that we can afford to live on. It’s all very reasonable when you actually think about it. These are the words of Lewis Baker, one of the…

The transfer window finally came to a close last Thursday. As ever, it was characterised by a lot of headlines about wages. At the TUC, we’re a fan of wages being in the news – but in Premier League football, it’s not low wages that are making headlines. Real wages have been falling for the…

Working Families and workplace solutions expert Bright Horizons track key issues for working parents in our annual Modern Families Index. In 2016, we highlighted how millennial parents are feeling at work (prone to burn out and desperate for a better work-life balance); and in 2017 we warned the UK risks a ‘fatherhood penalty’, with fathers…

Today we’re publishing the findings from our research with over 1,000 young mums and dads. We wanted to know what young mums and dads thought about the workplace rights which are supposed to help them manage their childcare. We asked them: If they are aware of three key existing employment rights which could help working…

I have a blog in The New Statesman, entitled Workers on boards was an enlightened idea – Theresa May should have stuck to it. It sets out the TUC’s comments on the government’s corporate governance proposals, after our initial response described the proposals as feeble. And in the Guardian, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady and the Adam Smith Institute’s Sam…

Once again, a hard Brexiter has let the mask slip on workers’ rights. Speaking to the BBC yesterday, Lord Harris – a multi-millionaire, retail tycoon and Tory peer – claimed that Brexit would ‘give younger people more opportunity’ because they could work longer hours in his shops. “We can only keep our staff on for 35 hours…

It’s been a challenging summer for the UK economy with growth slowing, demand declining, business investment stalling and the UK’s balance of trade deteriorating. In happier news employment levels are at a record high, although real wages have continued to decline. So what’s going on in the economy? GDP growth The chart below represents the…